


Threat Level

by lonelywalker



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:21:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post X3, Pyro tracks down Magneto.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Threat Level

1\. Low

They’ve confiscated his hair gel. They’ve thrown away his toothpaste and frowned at the song selection on his iPod. For a few anxious seconds it had looked like they were going to order a full body cavity search for the grievous sin of having an illegally-ripped copy of _American Idiot_. Pyro wiggles his toes and looks around at the line of bored tourists queuing up behind him. He had worried about being too visible in a crowd – after all, security camera footage of his recent escapades has been on the net for months – but his concerns are being made a joke by reality.

As if anyone cares about Osama anymore. Just some Saudi flatscan with too much time and money. Yeah, so on 9/11 John had sat open-mouthed in front of the television with the rest of them. He had made the phone calls, checking on relatives even though the Professor could tell who was in trouble and who was fine in a heartbeat. Then, more than ever, it had been vital just to talk. And so what if John didn’t have any relatives to call? At least he could call _somebody_ ’s relatives. The conversation was much the same anyway – someone relieved that he was okay, that they were all okay.

He had been shocked then, by the kind of scenes he had been taught only ever occurred in movies. Now it seems ridiculous. So, yeah, some religious fanatic can spend years planning in his homie’s basement, and figure out some ingenious way to pack explosives in his shoes. Yeah, some of this security might catch him. But Cyclops could blow a plane out of the sky just using his eyes, not to mention what Erik could do. And that’s without going anywhere near an airport.

There’s been tentative talk of using telepaths to detect terrorists of both the mutant and the mundane varieties. It’ll never work. There aren’t enough psionic mutants anyway, and with Dr. Grey and the Professor dead, no way to find more. If anyone is going to bar Pyro from this flight, they’ll have to do it with the usual crap – no fly lists and photographs. Neither bothers him. His jacket holds a perfectly forged passport – Canadian – and not even Mystique knows he has it. An apparently idle thought from Erik, months ago. Perhaps he had known what was coming.

They’re doing something to his sneakers, swabbing them to detect explosives. Pyro has been left with his worn gray socks exposed to the world, and half an hour until his flight leaves, with or without him. The thumb of his right hand twitches – a long-ingrained response to boredom – but his lighter is in a numbered locker in Queens. He feels oddly prepubescent and naked without it. Maybe this is how Erik feels. Pyro wonders if the sense of panic he can sense in his stomach will get better or worse with time. Time heals all hurts, Professor Xavier had told him. Pyro remembers the feel of Erik’s scars under his fingertips and shivers.

“Here you go, sir.” A security guard passes him his shoes as yet another punk kid – orange hair, leather jacket, _Mutant Rights Now!_ t-shirt – sits down on the bench and starts to unlace his Converse All-Stars. Pyro tries not to laugh at the glances the other boy provokes. Didn’t there used to be a time when kids with bizarre hair were _normal_? Levering on his shoes, his gaze wanders to an Arab woman in the line, her hair covered by the hijab. Something in him wants to stay and find out who gets examined more thoroughly, but this isn’t the time for class projects.

Storm would be pleased, he thinks, trailing off towards the departure gate. So much for racial profiling.

 

2\. Guarded

Once, when they hoped the Professor wasn’t listening in, John, Bobby, and Rogue had drawn up a list of all the things Erik might be able to do with his powers. Bobby had taken it too seriously at first, and insisted on leafing through reference books at the slightest suggestion of a biological impossibility. Rogue, who had known too much, had stayed quiet until John had suggested that Erik – well, “Magneto”, he had said then – might be able to kill a man by ripping the iron from his blood.

“No,” Rogue had said. “He can’t do that.”

There had been something dangerous in her tone, that hint that she _just knew_ and that should be left as that, but John had felt the cool metal of the lighter in his pocket and had managed not to be daunted. “Bet you he can.”

She had met his eyes, and parted her lips as if about to argue her case. But the moment had passed, and she had turned away. Bobby had been quick to suggest that they do some real studying, like that geography homework John had been pushing to the back of his desk drawer for more than a week. They had all pretended it was nothing.

He had been too good at pretending, then. They all had been. In the same desk drawer, he had a crumpled copy of the student code of conduct – be courteous, be honest, think of your fellow students, act like a boy scout and maybe one day you could be a pinnacle of manhood like Mr. Summers! Wow. What an achievement that would be.

The code had fallen out with his homework, almost forgotten. Maybe Rogue had read it more recently. Maybe she had believed it. In the air between them in the study room hung that unspoken, easily mocked argument: “He _wouldn’t_ do that.”

In the presence of the Professor, with his Savile Row suits and cultured tones, it had been difficult to remember that Magneto had never been a member of a gentleman’s club, and was unlikely to follow any rules of common decency. Still, back then, it had been nice to hope.

The third night after Alkali Lake – his first in a proper bed, when he didn’t have to fall asleep in a helicopter seat or to drop, exhausted, into the corner of a warehouse, the old fears of the boogieman had returned. The room had been nice enough, surprisingly so, although the company had warned him that the pleasant elderly couple who had smiled at him and promised him a good homemade dinner were not entirely as they appeared. Xavier would have loved it, even in all its duplicity. Erik and Mystique had seemed happy with the joke – this American Gothic lifestyle in the middle of nowhere. Pyro had never been comfortable playing at being normal.

But, despite the fire at his fingertips, he had locked the door. The door to his dorm room at the school hadn’t even had a lock. Doug Ramsey had muttered about it being a holdover from Erik’s days as something more sedate than a mutant terrorist. Bobby had shrugged and said there was no reason for a lock, anyway. He had been right. Woe betide anyone who broke in on Iceman and Pyro and Colossus and whatever Doug’s dumb codename had been. It was stupid, in a way, to break the habit by locking a door against _Magneto_ , of all people. He probably couldn’t even have kept Mystique out. After all, the door might have been good solid oak, but the hinges couldn’t have taken much punishment.

Erik had said a lot about war in the daytime, had asked him about von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and other people whose names Pyro had only ever seen on one of the Professor’s epic reading lists. He had thought that those masses of paper, stapled together, had just been a kind of reassurance that several people other than the Professor actually cared about the subject. Worryingly, it seemed as if Erik had actually read them. Even scarier was the idea that he seemed to expect Pyro to read them too. Even the footnotes.

Pyro hadn’t known what a good soldier should have done. The feather-soft mattress and hearty dinner had made it difficult to get into much of a wartime sensibility. He had half-expected Mystique to suddenly drop something like, “you take the midnight to five thirty watch” on him after dinner, but instead he had made it to his room with nothing but a chorus of “good night” and “sleep well” from the four of them. It had almost been scary in its banality. Even if Pyro’s aims had been unclear at that point, he was sure that he hadn’t flagged down the helicopter in order to _make nice_.

It had been a relief when he had heard the quiet murmur of the door being opened without a key, and felt Erik’s breath raise the hairs on his neck. Pyro had swallowed, and looked straight ahead. “They say you can kill a man by tearing the iron out of his blood,” he had said with an admirably steady tone, only then daring to move his eyes and glance at Erik. “Could you do that?”

A smile had twitched at the corners of Erik’s mouth. “No,” he had said.

“But you _would_ do it, right?” Pyro had asked, more interested then in winning an old argument than he was in Erik’s hand on his thigh. “You’ve tried?

He never had got his answer, at least not in words, but Pyro knew that he had won. When Erik had finally kissed him, the fillings in his back teeth had vibrated so hard it had hurt for hours. Even so, he couldn’t help but smile.

 

3\. Elevated

It all sucks. The food, the movie, the oh-so-witty banter of the pilot that he can barely hear over the intercom. Even the air is terrible, stale stuff that clogs up his throat and makes him blow his nose ten times an hour. One of the flight attendants, a plump blonde who seems determined to look after him, keeps asking if he’s okay, if she can get him anything. Maybe she thinks he’s twelve: one of those unaccompanied minors the airlines have to stop from choking on pretzels.

He had thought it would be more glamorous. Mystique should be icily cold in a business suit, studiously tapping at her laptop and ignoring the attentions of amorous businessmen. Erik, perhaps, should be dispensing his usual round of apparently fatherly advice while one hand massaged Pyro’s crotch and dared him to make a sound. And Pyro would sit, pretending to read all about Bali nightlife, knowing that he could kill everyone on the plane without much more than a flick of the wrist.

But his fingers itch for a banned lighter, and the turbulence is making the Pepsi swill around his belly, and he really _is_ reading about Bali nightlife. There have been reports on the news in the last few weeks of terrorist plots, and nervous passengers picking on anyone who seemed out of the ordinary: a Jewish man praying; two men speaking Urdu; someone who committed the grievous crime of wearing a coat in the summer. Pyro had laughed, but now he squirms in his seat and looks around a little nervously. Super-powered mutant he might be, but there’s nothing on this plane that could raise so much as a spark. If there’s a Muslim fanatic on this plane, or even – he tries to raise a smile at the thought – a mutant fanatic, he’ll be as powerless as the next teenage boy.

The next teenage boy is, irritatingly, sitting elbow to elbow with him. He could be Bobby Drake with a kippah, reading a beginner’s guide to Hebrew. Pyro had overheard him tell the flight attendant that he’s going to Israel to volunteer in the army. Better hope that guide tells him the most important phrases: “duck!”, “I surrender”, and “please don’t shoot me”.

“What’s the point?” Pyro asks him. “The war’s over, anyway.”

The boy, as young as he is, looks at him with some of Erik’s weary world-knowledge. “We’re Jewish,” he says. “It’s never over.”

Pyro wonders what exactly this kid knows about violence. Probably some idealistic rich kid who went to those expensive religious day schools. Okay, so Pyro had gone to a private school himself, but it’s not as if he had _paid_ for it. Pyro’s seen battle, now. He’s seen people die. He’s maybe even killed people, although he’s not sure and he doesn’t want to be sure. But this kid wants to go and fight a battle on another continent, beside people he doesn’t know and whose language he doesn’t speak. It all seems just a little insane.

“You should join up, too,” the soldier boy says.

Pyro shakes his head. “I’m not Jewish.”

He’s wondered, on the nights when he’s traced the numbers on Erik’s arm with a fingertip, how much it mattered to Erik that he had mutant powers. Even as a flatscan, Erik would still belong to at least two groups that get beaten up in the schoolyard. He’d still be fighting. He’d still lie awake at night, tense under Pyro’s touch, furious at his inability to do more. Even with the power to destroy a nuclear base, every report of a mutant being lynched or beaten or made to take the cure had been an arrowhead in his side.

Now the rumor is that Magneto is no more, that the cure has robbed him of the powers and the skills that made him a nightmare for human authorities. Pyro’s read all the stories, trawled the news sites with a feeling of dread each morning that they would have caught him. But now they refer to Magneto in the past tense. The entire US army can’t find Osama – and he’s still a threat – so why waste energy on a man who is now nothing more than the sum of his parts? He’s an old Jewish fairy with no strength, no resources, and no followers. Forget him, and let him die.

It’s been easier for Pyro to be dead, too. There was no body, of course, but in the chaos of Alcatraz anything could have happened to his remains. Perhaps he was engulfed in his own flames. Maybe he’s only ashes on the water. Being a ghost in New York has been easy in all respects but one. He’s had money, and a place to crash, and he hasn’t had to resort to flipping burgers yet, but he’s missed _knowing_. In the days before Alcatraz, Erik had shared cheap cigarettes with him in the woods while they discussed the future of the world. Those words of absolute domination, of being free, had made him hard without being touched. He hopes that Erik has said no prayers for him. He hopes that he hasn’t been remiss in saying none for Erik.

The soldier boy grins at him – one of those beautifully insincere smiles that says _you don’t understand_. “It’s not about that,” he says. “It’s about doing what’s right.”

Pyro turns back to his pages of Bali nightclubs . He doesn’t need Erik’s breath on his ear to tell him what Erik would say. “It isn’t about what’s right at all,” he says in low, clear tones. “It’s about winning. It’s always been about winning.”

 

4\. High

“Are we going to win?”

It had been easy to lose themselves in the forest at night, even with Erik’s guards posted at intervals around the perimeter of the camp. Erik had muttered something about Agincourt, and left the troops to their sleep and their worries about the fight to come. Pyro had been glad to escape, for a little while, into the darkness and the silence. The days of being Erik’s right hand man had given him a thrill of power, delegating tasks and providing a conduit of information to Magneto himself. Everyone had called him Magneto, then. Probably no one cared about his real name, no one since Mystique had been cured. The change had made Pyro smile. Then, he had been able to lie with his head on Erik’s chest and know that he was the only one who had a glimpse of the man rather than the legend.

Erik had been quiet, morose, after Xavier’s death, but no one else had had any need to be concerned. After all, they had no idea of who Erik was when he wasn’t being Magneto, when he wasn’t making speeches and pounding X-Men into the dirt. Pyro had at least hoped he knew. Erik had touched him on the shoulder, nothing more, steering him off into the trees. No one had followed. They had both made sure of that. Maybe Erik can’t kill people using the iron in their blood, but he can certainly smell it.

They had sat down on a mossy, slightly damp fallen tree in the darkness as Pyro lit their cigarettes. Erik’s smile at the spark between his fingers was a small one, caught between the flickers of an orange flame.

“You should think about your options,” Erik had said, and it had been far from the confident assurance of victory Pyro had expected.

He hadn’t liked the smoke much, hadn’t liked the taste or the way the cigarettes kept luring him back, but he had liked the moments they had given him. He had liked the company. “My options?”

“This is war.” Erik had sounded old in the darkness, older than he ever appeared in the daylight. “If Charles Xavier can die, who are any of us to remain standing?”

Pyro had become a championship player at the denial game recently. The Professor had been old. He had been weak. He hadn’t been willing to defeat his enemies using whatever means was necessary. Pyro could never die that way. “You think you can trust her?”

He had stayed away from Dr. Grey – or the thing that used to be Dr. Grey. He hadn’t been able to get over the idea that she had been rotting from the inside, some horrible walking dead thing. If he didn’t catch himself in time, he had even imagined the smell, like that putrid goulash Peter had left in the fridge for a month. Erik had simply breathed in smoke, and looked away.

Once Pyro’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, it hadn’t been so difficult to see, even though there had been no lights for at least five hundred meters. There had been starlight, and the glow of two cigarettes. Pyro had stubbed his out. Watching the way Erik had smoked, burning the tobacco right down till there’s nothing left, had been more interesting than smoking himself. With Xavier dead, and the Jean Grey-zombie-Phoenix-thing on their side, there had been no need for the heavy, angular helmet. No one could have found them that night.

Pyro had reached out a hand to touch Erik’s hair. As always, it had been stiff like wire, and Erik had pushed him away after a moment. It had been no gentle rebuke, either. Pyro had landed on his back on the pine needle floor of the forest, the air knocked out of him. He had learned a long time ago that Erik won’t tolerate being possessed. Maybe the Professor had been easier to keep at arm’s length. Maybe the way the Professor could always get into Erik’s head made him the way he is now. Pyro had flicked his hand, igniting a flame from the fuel jet at his wrist. He had wanted Erik to see him smile.

Once, he had thought of asking Mystique if Erik was capable of being anything other than a violent lover. But getting the question out amidst battle attack plans and laundry had proved impossible. And perhaps he would have been assuming too much, anyway. He can’t imagine that Erik ever fucked the Professor with such force, but he has trouble thinking of the Professor as anything other than a paralyzed librarian. It’s like the idea that his mother has sex. He just doesn’t want to think about it.

Pyro had still been smiling when Erik had ground his cigarette into the dirt, got to his feet, and crouched down next to him. The darkness had still not been complete, but Pyro had closed his eyes anyway. Something in him had wanted to remember the little things. There will always be pictures of Erik online. Nothing has a record of the taste of him, of that nicotine-stained breath and of the firm strength of his hands. No one else would ever know the way that Erik had turned him over, to let his chest be pricked by pine needles and his cheek pressed into the dirt.

It had been uncomfortable, with little but hard earth beneath him and Erik’s weight forcing him down. Every breath, shallow and quick, had seemed to drag more dirt into his nostrils and mouth. He had choked on it when he had felt Erik inside him, hard and deep. It had been sex without consideration for pain or feelings, past or future. It had been wonderful. It had been victory.

 

5\. Severe

The plane lands on time, in the half-light of the early morning. It doesn’t matter. There’s no one waiting to greet him. Pyro shifts his weight from foot to foot, sandwiched between Hasidic families in the queue to go through customs. Maybe he could be swept along with them – the wayward son who eschewed the sidelocks and black coats in favor of ripped jeans and hair dye. Instead he finds himself in front of a Plexiglas window, with a uniformed soldier examining his passport.

“Why are you in Israel?” she asks him without looking up.

He’s asked himself the question enough times that he has a response ready. “I’m visiting a friend.” Maybe it’s a lie. But he smiles nicely, and she stamps him through.

The journey had been the easy part, even with security searches and no-fly lists and air marshals. Erik had made sure that, in a worst case scenario post-Alcatraz, he could slip by unnoticed. Now, in a foreign land, with no contacts and no possessions to speak of, he’s truly alone. No doubt Erik had imagined that he would either be victorious or dead. Since Alcatraz there’s been no whisper of contact, although Pyro has checked the usual places with an obsessive compulsion.

He could be dead, idle thoughts have suggested in dark hours. It must be hellish, living without his powers. He could have taken his own life. Pyro has imagined him lying in a pool of starkly crimson blood, a bullet through his brain. Even Erik would have disdained the idea of Magneto coming to such an ignominious end, but then Magneto had died on the island. For Erik Lehnsherr, perhaps suicide is only to be expected. Then again, it didn’t have to be by choice. Pyro has thought of blades in the hands of dumb muggers, flashing against Erik’s throat. What could he do against them? He’s just a man, now.

The frustration and the fear have made Pyro shiver at night, when he’s done with reading the newspapers and jacking off, when he only has the warmth of a spark between his fingers for company. The Professor used to talk about faith – about having an unshaken belief in principles no matter what the realities in any given situation. If you have a moral conviction against torture, he had said, you must hold that conviction even if your worst enemy knows how to defuse a ticking bomb, and he isn’t talking. The Professor’s lectures had only succeeded in making Pyro resolve never to have any moral convictions whatsoever. But… shit. He’s not giving up on Erik yet.

There’s a whole world to check, and Erik has been to most of it. But Israel had somehow seemed a more likely hiding place than a vaguely-remembered boyhood home in Poland, or the Professor’s isolated Scottish research labs. Erik had been here before he had been Magneto, before he had known what his talents really meant. He had been here when he had only been yet another young man fleeing the remnants of Nazi Germany and a broken Europe. Pyro hopes he’s here now.

He picks up one worryingly light backpack from baggage reclaim and wanders off through to Arrivals. A cluster of suited men holding up IBM and Intel signs barely gives him a glance. The local time is something far too early, although he’ll have to move quickly if he wants to get anything done before nightfall. He buys a cheap cigarette lighter at a magazine stand, together with a Coca-Cola bottle and a Mars bar. So much for supplies. The lighter is a piece of shit, but its presence finally steadies his nervous fingers. No point in buying anything nicer if he’ll just have to throw it in the trash when he hops on another flight.

A security guard tells him directions to the bus station. The gun on her hip makes him a little concerned, but there’s not even a hint of recognition in her eyes. Just another dumb American tourist, lost already. There’s a list of destinations in Hebrew and English when he gets there. Even though Israel’s a small country, finding one man could be impossible. He has to narrow down the search. Haifa – that’s where Erik and the Professor were, years ago. It’s also where rockets have been falling. And the only way for him to get there is by bus, in a country where public transport has a tendency to explode.

At least he can defend himself now, and he’s not the only one. Pyro hands over several dully-colored notes, and sits down behind four khaki-clad soldiers, rifles stacked on the floor. One of them leans over, wielding a cigarette, and says something that makes no sense to Pyro’s ears. Pyro gives him a light. It seems like the thing to do. He puts his bag down on the next seat, and sits with his shoulder to the window. He might as well see some of the landscape while he’s here, even if it’s mostly the exact same roads and cars and billboards he’d see in New York. It looks like he could be stuck in this seat for a while. Haifa is hours away, and the driver keeps stopping every mile or so to pick up and let off more passengers. Pyro looks at his watch, still running on New York time, and yawns, and closes his eyes.

He doesn’t sleep. The constant stopping and starting, and the noisy shuddering of the bus, makes it impossible to deaden all around him into some familiar but ignorable background rhythm. But at least no one will talk to him if they think he’s asleep. No one will care. Once he gets to Haifa, then he can start asking questions and finding where Erik might hang out. Pyro can imagine him in a quiet park somewhere, playing chess and debating the world with every passer-by. That’s a more pleasant image than the alternative, anyway.

“ _Zeh panui_?”

Maybe if he could fix that image in his mind, of Erik being, if not happy, then certainly safe, he wouldn’t have to go on looking. But the other ideas he’s had, the ones where nothing ends well, are far more resonant, and only reality will push them away.

“ _Slikha? Zeh panui_?”

The insistence of the voice makes him blink his eyes open. “Whuh? Uh, what?”

A couple of the soldiers in front glance around at his startled words, and turn away as soon as they see that he’s not having a fit or singing the praises of Allah. Pyro looks up and around, and his breath catches in his throat. Erik regards him with a hint of amusement, picking up his bag with a finger and depositing it on the floor. “You really do need to learn to be more considerate to your fellow passengers, young man.”

“Erik?” Maybe the name is a mistake. Maybe they’re supposed to still be doing all that cloak and dagger stuff on which Erik had been so keen in the US, but it’s all he can say.

Erik shrugs with his eyes, and sits down as the bus moves off again. He looks different, without the costume, without the weight of being Magneto on his shoulders. Army jacket with no insignia, shirt, khaki slacks… but it doesn’t matter. Pyro swallows, and attempts to offer an intelligent question. “How did you know I was here?”

Obviously it isn’t quite so clever. Erik seems disappointed. “Did you forget who gave you that passport, John?”

The name is a little jarring. Maybe “Pyro” would be too strange on a crowded bus, but even so… It makes him feel like a civilian.

“Is it true?” he asks, fingers worrying another hole in the plastic seat cover as he looks away. “Did they cure you?”

Erik’s hand is on his jaw, cool and strong, making him look up “My dear boy,” Erik says, and the sadness in his voice suggests that all Pyro’s fears have been well founded.

It’s the first time anyone has ever kissed him in public. He expects to be embarrassed, to have to break away and shakily tell the watching soldiers that he’s not gay. Uh uh. No way. But, as Erik’s hand caresses his hair, and a tongue delves into his mouth, a long-forgotten feeling begins to emerge.

Pyro pulls back, mouth open wide in shock and pain. He can’t even ask the question. After a moment, he reaches in with a finger and gently prods his teeth. “Fuck.”

And that, finally, is that. No more images of death and destruction, no speeches of victory or fears for the future. Just a kiss, the taste of metal in his mouth, and an absolute assurance that everything is going to be okay.

Erik pulls a bent, half-empty packet of cigarettes from his pocket, extracts two. “I assume I can rely on you for a light?”


End file.
